Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Drafting the Core Team Governance Document

"Gentoo is largely driven by participation in IRC discussions, and many of the day to day command decisions are made through informal (and sometimes apparently random) connections between individuals in one-on-one or public channels." Zachary T Welch

Since you mentioned bootstrapping .... We don't have a transparent, consistent, timely decision-making process for OpenACS. That's the basic tool the community needs to address everything else - all of Talli's issues about broader, non-geek involvement and Torben's points about decision making. If there's no focal point for decision-making, everything else fails because people try to participate but have no consistent, reliable mechanism to do so.

We have a core team. We have an "approved-by-nobody-screaming" proposal to using the TCL group's TIP process as our basic decision-making system. So why aren't we already using our own TIP process? They do TIPs on a mailing list. I think we would be better suited with a web-based system, and it could be just a dedicated forum for now and a fancier package now. It needs the following special rules (enforced by technology and moderation) to function:

The first message of a thread is a full TIP. The title has the tip number, "Proposed", and short description: "TIP #1 (Proposed): Use packagename/public-resources for non-permission-checked files"

Thread followups must directly address the TIP

Approval and Disapproval votes from the Core Team must be clearly marked - the reply title must start with "Approved by XX" or "Disapproved by XX".

Once we have a final status for a TIP, the original title is edited to reflect that."Tip #1 (Approved): Use packagename/public-resources for non-permission-checked files"

All core team members must subscribe to the forum.

If a new TIP gets two Approval votes and no Disapproval votes in the first (1 week?), it's Approved. If it gets at least one Disapproval vote, the original poster has to summarize objections and call for a full vote; the TIP then has (2 more weeks?) to accumulate 2/3 Approval of new votes cast (not counting the votes prior to the call for full vote) or else it's Disapproved.